Chicago Tribune Makes Final Push for Kelly Before E-Day, Attacks McKinley Again

This Tuesday voters in Illinois’ Second Congressional District will select who will replace former Congressman Jesse Jackson, Jr; in anticipation, the Chicago Tribune has launched its final assault against Republican Paul McKinley.

In doing so, the Tribune has firmly established their role in enabling the very system of collaboration between the press, the city leaders, and the unions that one candidate (McKinley) is fighting against.

The Tribune’s Bill Ruthhart penned an article (or advertisement?) Sunday, “Kelly getting out the vote days before the 2nd District election,” recommending to voters that Democrat nominee Robin “Kelly is ramping up her get-out-the-vote effort for an anticipated low-turnout contest.”

Ruthhart’s puff piece glosses over the most glaring concern readers of the Tribune might have about the Democratic Machine pick – her unresolved ethics violations – instead choosing to provide coverage of Kelly’s get out the vote message to voters.

Ruthhart quotes Kelly: “There’s a whole lot of effort around reminding people” to vote Tuesday, she said. “We’ll be out this weekend with door hangers and reminding people that it’s not over and they still need to vote.”

Ruthhart then mentions Kelly’s endorsement from President Obama, writing that she “denied she has been using a ‘rose garden’ strategy of lying for the general election to avoid any missteps.”

How Ruthhart came to this conclusion is difficult to ascertain; after hardly making a public appearance since the February 26 primary and practically disappearing from the campaign trail, Kelly held her own candidate forum on Thursday in lieu of participating in a candidate debate. It was at that one public appearance that Kelly made more than a casual misstep, as Breitbart reported (the Tribune has yet to inform its readers of this activity of Kelly’s).

Kelly essentially blamed the victims of the Aurora, CO, movie theater shooting, telling voters “in the movie [theater], they have conceal and carry, but nobody pulled out their guns to kill the gentleman that did all the damage that he did.”

As Breitbart News pointed out after her remarks on Friday, “the Cinemark Theater where the shooting took place was the only one within 20 minutes of suspect James Holmes’s apartment that had a policy banning guns from the premise. Victims and their families are preparing a lawsuit targeting Cinemark for allegedly failing to provide security for its patrons the night of the shooting.”

The Tribune also has yet to report on the enormous backlash Kelly received on her Twitter and her Facebook page, with hundreds of comments blasting her ignorance of what happened in Colorado and for making false claims to support her extreme opposition to Second Amendment rights.

Just as the Tribune has failed to report on any of the voter backlash, it has also failed to respond to readers’ outcry for them to host a debate between the two candidates.

As Legal Insurrection points out, Robin Kelly has refused throughout the campaign to accept opponent Paul McKinley’s debate challenges. In what appears to be an example of the very “rose garden strategy” that she denied using to Ruthhart, by avoiding any debates Kelly has managed to keep herself from being questioned about the ethics violations and at the same time avoided other Aurora-like gaffes.

Ruthhart didn’t miss yet another chance to reconvict McKinley on his past–the same past which McKinley openly refers to in his campaign–writing about his armed robbery conviction and focusing on his 20 years in prison, never mentioning, in the course of many reports, any of McKinley’s positions on issues facing the voters of the second district.

McKinley’s past is certainly fair game in an election to represent the people. But should Kelly’s be exempt?

Kelly allegedly failed to report time taken off from her duties as Chief of Staff to then State Treasurer Alexi Giannoulias while running an election to replace him. In February, Ruthhart reported on the story.

Ruthhart has also reported that “Executive Inspector General David Wells recommended that Kelly be disciplined” for getting paid by taxpayers while campaigning for public office.

Why, then, would Ruthhart fail to include Kelly’s ethics questions in his pre-Election Day report, instead using the pages to recycle her stump speech and bring up well-known information about McKinley? And beyond propping up Kelly, Ruthhart used the final election coverage to suggest–incorrectly–that $3,400 of the less than $10,000 the McKinley’s grassroots campaign was able to raise went to McKinley himself.

McKinley told Breitbart News that “every penny that has been spent by the campaign can be accounted for and there are receipts for everything,” saying that if any filings show otherwise, there has been an error that will be corrected immediately.

Ruthhart could have taken the opportunity to examine Kelly’s FEC filings, which show that of the several hundred thousand dollars raised from far left-wing groups like ACT Blue and Democracy for America, she reimbursed herself $7,000 from the campaign and refunded her husband $3,500. FEC records provide no evidence that money was ever loaned or put into the campaign by herself or her husband, leaving open the question: a refund for what?

Kelly’s campaign did not respond to Breitbart’s request for more information regarding those details.

Kelly’s records also indicate her campaign used funds to contribute to Planned Parenthood, a group McKinley says is waging a “black genocide” through the promotion of abortion in America.

What is most clear from Ruthhart’s fervor in propping up Kelly while recycling old news on McKinley is where the Tribune and its so-called watchdog reporters stand politically. While no surprise, it is time that voters and readers understand what their papers contribute to (the Machine), and for whom its reporters stump.

In fact, this special election to replace Jesse Jackson, Jr. in IL-02 has exposed the Chicago Media as a virtual PR firm for the Chicago Machine; we now have seen from their general refusal to cover the Republican primary to their attempted reconviction of Paul McKinely, they are the gatekeepers to the political power in Illinois, and when it comes to reporting any truth, it is done so in a way in which can do minimal harm to their candidate of choice, while allowing themselves to say they reported on it.

This is how the local media willingly aids in its stranglehold over the Chicago area and areas like Chicago all across the country.